Buckner works on improving memory
Those of other people, not his
By William J. Cromie / Harvard News Office

Randy Buckner tries to predict what you will remember. The newly
tenured professor of psychology and his Harvard colleagues have been
able to anticipate which words students will remember and have also
been able to improve the memories of older people.

Buckner, a 35-year-old neuroscientist, is one of the inventors of a
brain-imaging method that can trace the formation of pathways to
memory. "With this method, we can pull out signals of brain activity
that signal what will be remembered," he says.

"Randy's current work on memory and aging is probably the best in the
field, and it continues to grow in exciting new ways," says Stephen
Kosslyn, chair of the Department of Psychology at Harvard. "His
recent efforts promise fundamental discoveries about why people
differ in their cognitive abilities. In addition, he is an
extraordinarily nice guy."


Randy Buckner left basketball for brain science.

When people use different parts of their brains, blood flow to those
areas increases. Tracking that flow provides a way to see what's
happening in a brain, specifically when a memory is forming. However,
there's a technical problem: The response is sluggish.

"A memory-forming event may take a second or less," Buckner
explains. "Blood flow responses do not occur until the activity is
finished, which takes, maybe, 14-16 seconds. That makes it extremely
difficult to measure brief brain events."

Buckner helped to solve this problem along with his colleagues at the
Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General
Hospital, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School. When magnetic
resonance imaging (MRI) tracks brain activity, the images pile up in
a computer in a straightforward way, something like a stack of
photographs or playing cards. Buckner pioneered a way to unstack the
photos and look back one image at a time.

Such looks reveal that memories form when we pay attention to
specific things and elaborate on them. For example, comparing a new
face to one you know, or using a word you want to recall in a
sentence. "Students should know this," Buckner notes. "Elaboration is
a very useful method for studying."

Buckner also has participated in experiments wherein researchers
helped older people find strategies for remembering. "The results
show that memory can be improved in this way," he says. "But the work
was done in a laboratory under very specific conditions. It's not yet
clear if the same memory aides will be helpful in everyday
situations." He and a lot of other researchers are working to find
the answer.

No hoops but lots of memories
Growing up, Buckner never thought he'd be doing this kind of
work. "In high school, my main interest was basketball," he
recalls. "When I chose a college, I picked the academically best
school where I could play the game." That turned out to be Washington
University in St. Louis.

"After the first year of Division 3 basketball, I realized that my
skills lay elsewhere," he admits. "Still, 'Wash U.' was good for me -
I became interested in memory and learned how to use brain imaging as
a way to study it." After eight years of study and research, Buckner
earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Washington University School
of Medicine in 1996.

A postdoctoral fellowship then brought him to Harvard Medical School,
where he did research with Daniel Schacter, now Kenan Professor of
Psychology. Schacter remembers Buckner as "one of the most energetic
and imaginative researchers I have ever known. Randy is very
enthusiastic about what he does, and this helps to make him a
standout teacher as well as a terrific scientist. Both his students
and colleagues will benefit greatly from that. He is also an
exceptionally congenial person who is well liked by anyone who knows
him."

Schacter and Buckner will teach a course on memory together next
fall. "I look forward to that," Buckner comments. "Harvard students
are truly remarkable. It's clear that you are interacting with our
future leaders."

The course will explore the everyday function of memory and the brain
activity that this involves. "We often test memory in the laboratory
by asking people to muse about the past," Buckner notes. "What they
recall is likely to aid decision making and their predictions of what
will happen next."

Buckner has personal reasons for discovering all that he can about
the memory loss that accompanies aging and Alzheimer's. "It is a
disease that has affected several members of my family," he
says. "For this reason I shifted a portion of my research program
about six years ago. Since then I, and others, have made some
progress in this area. It has been personally gratifying to work on
something so relevant to my family."

This research has produced modest success in getting older people to
realize they have natural strategies they can use to boost their
memories. However, Alzheimer's can affect the brain in ways that make
such strategies unavailable to those with the disease. Buckner is
trying to find out what goes wrong before memory problems begin.

One major reason for doing this kind of exploration at Harvard is the
new Center for Brain Research being built on the Cambridge campus. It
will house the latest in brain-scanning technology and include
colleagues interested in every aspect of research from the activity
of single cerebral cells to human behavior.

When not researching or teaching, Buckner has taken up cycling. "I'm
looking forward to discovering the roads and trails of
Massachusetts," he says. He has not put up a basketball hoop outside
his house.

<http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2006/05.25/05-buckner.html>